Blogs Perk Sales for High-Tech Coffee Mug

We’ve been saying blogs are serious business tools, and can help get your message out to more people faster than a traditional website. The story above is a case in point on how to use blogs to launch a new product by targeting the early adopters and influencers who are reading blogs now.

Build it and they will come?

The common mistake that so many people make is thinking “I’ll build a website and visitors will come.” That doesn’t work. Even if you optimize for search- it’s not enough to get you to the top- fresh content can help, but it’s really about building a network- links to other sites, communities, connections with your customers- that makes the traffic start to show up.

Think about who your target market is- and how to get them talking about your products or services- and then go out and make those connections. If your site is going to be your best salesperson- make it get out of the office- and network, network, network- and blogs are an excellent tool to accomplish that networking.

Seth’s Blog: How to get traffic for your blog.One of the things every blogger thinks they want is a lot of traffic. However, traffic, for traffic’s sake won’t help you grow your business- unless you are part of some google adsense pyramid scheme.

So- Seth Godin, the mack daddy of bloggers, has this post with “54 ways to build traffic to your blog” listed. Take a look- and of course realize that it’s really only 27 since almost everything he lists- also lists the opposite.

From my experience, the most important thing is to be quick to write about a subject that is fresh. Be the first, break the news, provide insight on something that just hit big in the media. For political bloggers- this is easy- for those of you writing about the latest news in local video production- it’s a little harder.

Always, stay on topic- and if you are using WordPress, think hard about your categories and use them (making sure you give each category description text in your manage/categories screen) on every post. Each post should fall into several categories.

Also- always make sure you alt tag your images- and links- with descriptions that blind people and search bots can understand. One site with content everyone was looking for was getting no hits- all because they didn’t have alt tags on their photos describing what the photos showed.

Seth is always interesting- too bad he’s closed comments and trackbacks- so I won’t get any hits from his traffic- oh, yeah- that’s another way to build traffic.

RapattoniMLS-Access-Instructions.pdf (application/pdf Object)

One of the things we stress in the Blogosopher course is adherence to W3C standards- and especially, accessibility for the blind. The main reason is that search engines act just like blind people on the web- they can’ t go where they don’t know where they are going.

Part of web standards is using code that everyone understands- not any proprietary systems- like the one Rappattoni uses to build their Multiple Listing Service (MLS) sites.

Apparently they require Microsoft Internet Explorer to work with their site- and Microsoft abandoned the program for the Apple Macintosh in January of 2006- mostly because they were having a hard enough time updating Explorer for the PC (which is still not RSS aware).

I found the link above – with instructions for installing some software for a Mac so you can view their site. But, this is a reminder to companies that decide to build sites based on proprietary standards or software technology- you may be shutting out some of your best customers without knowing it.